Health economics has made or stimulated numerous contributions to various areas of economics: the theory of human capital; the economics of insurance; principal-agent theory; asymmetric information; econometrics; the theory of incomplete markets; and, the foundations of welfare economics. This title surveys the literature in health economics.

As a relatively new subdiscipline of economics, health economics has made many contributions to areas of the main discipline, such as insurance economics. This volume provides a survey of the burgeoning literature on the subject of health economics.

All too frequently, the largest effective barrier to interdisciplinary communication is jargon. The symposium whose proceedings appear in the following pages sought, of course, to eliminate unnecessary and obscurantist jargon; but it sought also to do something far more ambitious - to confront the intellectual issues that are attached to the use of the word "evaluation" in medicine and health services. To this end a carefully selected group of experts in medicine, epidemiology, and health econom ics was invited to present papers. They were selected for their reputations either as...